One of my favorite blogging traditions with Exfanding Your Horizons was making up New Year's resolutions with my blogging buddy and then reflecting on them a year later. The blog went on permanent hiatus on the day we'd normally do our writing and reflecting, and I somehow never reinstated the tradition on this blog.

That's because, originally, this blog was little more than a place to get my writing fix until Exfanding came back from hiatus. Something temporary. I wasn't planning on setting down roots here and carrying on with traditions. This was the same thing I said about moving to the moon, and I've been living here since 2011. Somewhere along the line, this blog and my moon base became my home, and it's only recently that I've been treating them as such. I'd been waiting for the day where I'd resume business as usual, but this is business as usual. Time to stop looking to the past like it's the future. Time to look at the present and do something about it if it's not to my liking. What a good time to start making resolutions again.

"Resolutions" isn't the right word, though. Resolutions are promises you feel guilty for breaking. I prefer to set goals; goals are things you feel good about achieving. I've learned to set reasonable goals for myself that are general enough to accomplish, but specific enough to be meaningful. Here's what I have in mind for 2016:

Goal #1: Start and finish a YouTube playthrough of Mega Man 8.Anyone familiar with the saga of Mega Man 7 knows how much of a stretch this one is. Each Mega Man video series I've done has taken longer than the last, so smart money says I won't accomplish this goal until 2020 at the very earliest. Smart money is inanimate and highly flammable, however, so you shouldn't listen to it. I've streamlined my recording process and am livestreaming on a regular basis, which keeps me in the recording spirit, so I believe I can make this happen if I keep at it.

Goal #2: Make serious headway on the video game my wife and I are planning.We don't talk about it much because we want to keep the particulars a secret, but my wife and I are working on a video game. It's still in the planning stages, but I'd like to have at least a partially playable beta ready before the end of the year.

Goal #3: Run at least one D&D campaign, then learn a new tabletop RPG system and run another campaign.Since I started playing in college, Dungeons & Dragons has been an endless source of stories and one of my favorite ways to spend time with people. Moving to the moon has put me out of touch with a regular group of players, but nothing says I can't host the occasional one-shot campaign for friends and family who are willing to hop on a rocketship and drop in for a weekend. I'm also looking to diversify beyond D&D, as my other tabletop RPG experience is quite limited, and there's a copy of the Serenity Roleplaying Game rulebook on my shelf that's been gathering dust for too gorram long.

Goal #4: Read 12 books.I was an avid reader up until late middle school or early high school, at which point I started associating reading with work, rather than with leisure. I've since warmed back up to reading as a pastime, and I casually follow a number of blogs, but I'd like to get back in the habit of reading as an alternative to the electronic entertainment that dominates my life. One book a month doesn't seem unreasonable, especially if I include graphic novels, which totally count.

Goal #5: Get my Backloggery progress index into positive double digits.It's only since 2014 that I've been finishing more video games a year than I add to my collection, but just barely. Net progress in 2014 was +5, and 2015 was a measly +2 (technically +3, if you count the game I sold in December but forgot to remove from my list until New Year's Day). Lest you think this is a "play more video games" goal, my intention here is to be more discerning with how I spend my time and money, trimming my collection down to only the games I truly want to be there.

Goal #6: Write like I used to.There are three meanings here: write regularly, write positively, and write for myself. Writing is cathartic, and I want to look back on a year's worth of posts that I would want to read, even if I hadn't written them. I want to unearth the bright-eyed, happy little kid inside me who's been buried under the layers of anger, frustration, disappointment, and anxiety that have accumulated over the last few years of resisting the present instead of reshaping it. With GameCola on hiatus, it's more important than ever that I make this website feel like home, and writing like I used to may be the best way to do it.

Ta-dah! A half-dozen goals, and those are just the ones I'm writing down (I'll spare you the one about eating less fried dough this time). Ambitious? Yes, but not unreachable. These aren't only goals; they're lifestyle changes, or at least catalysts for such—and after the 2015 I had, I have never been so ready for change. See you back here in a year to assess my success!

2015 ended on a high note for me. Good time spent with friends and family, some of the best weeks of work I've had all year, plenty of vacation time, meaningful personal development, and a change of focus that I hope will lead to a joyful and productive 2016. You'll note one big absence on this list: GameCola.net suffered a catastrophic server failure early in the month—the day before the shortest review I've ever written got posted, as though the website couldn't cope with me writing anything of substance shorter than 700 words.

Normally we'd revert to a recent backup version of the site, but due to mysterious technical issues, the latest backup we had was from sometime in November. An executive decision was made to put the site on hiatus to give our webmaster time to look into recovering the lost data, but also to give the Editor-in-Chief time to work on GameCola 4.0, a revised version of the site with all the modern bells and whistles we've been missing. I'll no doubt write more about the situation as time goes on, but in the meantime, I've been devoting my free time to other side projects that have been languishing for too long.

It's good to be writing again on a regular basis, and writing more positively, at that. In addition to the posts below, which hopefully represent a return to the kind of writing I used to do for Exfanding Your Horizons in its heyday, I was busy working on my Series Opinions for Star Trek: The Original Series and Enterprise, which I'll formally link to once they're complete.

One GameCola contribution managed to slip through, despite the main site being out of commission. In honor of the new Star Wars movie, I kicked off a playthrough of one of my all-time favorite games, and it's been helping me refine my livestreaming style. The third installment of Jedi Knight and the second Backloggery Choice stream are two of my favorites so far (if nothing else, watch the Paperboy section of the first video below).

Of course, no mention of YouTube videos would be complete without a celebration of the true, final, real end of the Mega Man 7 recording saga. One of the funniest things I've ever released, according to me, and a joy to assemble.

December is always a bad month for my struggle against the evil Bak'laag. Between Christmas, winter sales on Steam and GOG, and holiday travels that take me near used game stores, my game collection always seems to inflate around this time. At least my patience has run out for games that aren't worth my time; I'm abandoning bad and unrewarding games with a vengeance nowadays, and I've decided to go back to playing only the games I think I'll like—anything that's culturally worthwhile but not worth the effort is something I can watch someone else play on YouTube.